 I'd like to welcome you again to the 39th annual Festival of the American Place here. We've got a really incredible panel for you this morning. I'd also like to welcome everyone who's live streaming on HowlRoundTV right now. Today's panel is presented in part by the Louisville Arts and Cultural Association's Yes Fest, which is the year of environment and sustainability at the Yolong Festival that connects Louisville's arts and cultural organizations to consider our impact on the environment and also how we can foster a healthier world. Our panel discussion this morning was born out of an increased focus in recent years on interdisciplinary research and learning between various forms of sciences and arts around the country, especially at institutions of higher learning. We're really excited about the group that we have here today, both artists and scientists. Their specialties range from performance art to physics, climate science, information, visualization, and music, and together they're working to challenge the conventional boundaries of their craft and also help answer some of today's most pressing environmental questions, like how do artists and scientists unique strengths benefit discovery? How do we measure interdisciplinary success in any particular work? And how might some of these successes help to change policy on global climate change? So with us today, from left to right, we have Steve Cawson, who's also our moderator. He's the Artistic Director of the Civilians, which is a New York-based theater company creating original work derived from investigating the world around us and beyond theater. We have Joan Wander, who's a playwright and a theater maker living in Minneapolis, who recently participated in a program called the Arctic Circle. And that's an international artist residency abroad on an ice-class sailing vessel in the High Arctic. We have Jessica Segal, a multidisciplinary artist living in New York City, and investigating the link between creativity and survival. Evo Peters, who's an experimental physicist working at the University of Chicago, where he's investigating the dynamic behavior of granular suspensions. And Cynthia Hopkins, who's an internationally acclaimed musical performance artist, and finally we have Ruth West, who's an artist, scientist, and director of the X-Rez Arts and Science Lab at the University of New York, Texas. Each part of the panelist is going to take a few minutes to share one of their interdisciplinary projects with you, just to provide a little bit of context of what these collaborations can look like. Then we'll have some time for our panel discussion, and then we'll after 10 or 15 minutes if you can take your questions. So please join me in welcoming Steve and Ruth to our panel. Thanks. Thank you all for getting up this morning and coming out. So we're just going to start off, each of us is going to speak very briefly about our projects, but then as we have our discussion, I think we'll each get into the details of what we did and each of our collaborations. And I'm going to first. So I'm going to talk about a project with the civilians to play a role in great immensity that was the writer, director, collaborating with Michael Friedman, who was the composer. The play was about climate change, and it was created through not necessarily an artist-science direct collaboration, but I made play from a lot of conversations with scientists, and in that sense it was very collaborative. The work of the play started with a trip to an island in the Panama Canal, which is called Borough, Colorado Island, which is essentially a reserve of tropical rainforests. The only people there are scientists and not really anything directly to do with climate change, and these are pictures from the production of Bill McAven in New York. But I had no clue as to what to do or what the show was going to be or how to make it, so I figured I was trapped on an island with other scientists and they were trapped with me, that I could hang out and watch what they do, and then ask them all these certain questions that I wanted to ask them, which were things like, you know, how you go on? Do you believe in God? Do you think there's something that's protecting the climate? Stuff like that. And it was revelatory. Every conversation would start off over lunch, you go for four hours, and that really laid the foundation for the play. So the rest of it very briefly, then with the town in Churchill, Churchill Canada, in Canada, which is the polar bear capital of the world, did more than you used there. There's Arctic scientists in Churchill that did more than you used with, and then we did, we were fellows at Princeton, Princeton Environmental Institute, and got access to all of the Princeton scientists, they asked everyone to ask them and they agreed my draft didn't give me notes, but often plot notes, character notes. And some of the goods. It was like I have a Nobel Prize winner as my importer. And then there's also the climate model in Princeton, so we had access, we had all of the scientists as a climate model for an afternoon to talk to them, and then made a play. And the show was funded by the National Science Foundation, which was the first time that they funded a play on that scale. So back to the great amnesty, and on to Joe. Hi. So my approach to this is starting when I was a kid, and I've always been attracted to really cold remote places, and I used to make travel brochures with crayons and colored pencils to get my parents to take us on vacations to cold remote places, which we never went to. So a lot of the work when I started writing became a way for me to imagine going to those places. So some of the images that you'll see are from different projects that I've done. I have imagined trips to Antarctica as traditional plays. I have worked with some scientists and coders when I was in graduate school at Brown to create a virtual reality environment of Antarctica, I imagine it, creating visuals composed entirely of text that are maddened log journals of the trip that I've never taken. And also kind of challenge the drawings. And then while I was also at Brown, I got a grant to go to Iceland to work on a project that's kind of been seven years and an eight. That was really mostly about folklore and most mythology. And I was really interested in how Iceland was trying to explain its landscape in literature, and that folklore and mythology in Iceland was a way of teaching children lessons, but also a way of explaining the weird culture that was in the middle of the field from a troll battle or this incredible waterfall and there's thousands of waterfalls in Iceland. It's insane. And those were the tears of giants. I thought that was that really spoke to me. And I'd always wanted to go to the Arctic Circle. So there's a program called the Arctic Circle that Zach mentioned in my bio. That's where they take 30 people. In my instance, there was a mix of artists and scientists or a sailing vessel for three weeks. And it's project-driven, so whatever you want to work on. And I thought that I was going to go and create a... I was going to write this mythology for Svalbard, whatever that was. And I got there, and there's no stories to mine from. There's no stories of giants or trolls or hidden people. There's... Science got there first, so there was no need to try and explain the landscape. But that was even more interesting to me that there's this mythology of scientists and that there's... You sit at a bar in one of the very few towns. And you're usually sitting next to a scientist and glaciologist and fisherman and some tourists. But it's just... So much is happening here in terms of science. And the little seat bank being located there. And there's this incredible change that changes the atmosphere. That's crazy and awesome. So that's the project that I'm working on now. I did get to do a lot of the research there. I kind of figured it out while I was there. But I did. I have some shots, I think, from a short film that I made while I was there that was inspired by Italian Explorer and the Pope. And kind of imagining a conversation that they would have and trying to cross the North Pole. And the battle that they had between science, okay? And doing so. Hello, I'm Jessica. And I have a short video clip that maybe I could just show before I speak about the topic. It's a shallow electronics and video projection that I made in collaboration with Evo Peters here last year. That was premiered at Lynx Hall in Chicago, a constellation theater. So you sort of imagine... I think you'll see an image later of actual how the performance is set up with the video projection in the background, live cellist and electronics on stage as the video is being played. And that was part of a whole evening review of music, performance, dance with Fuse Muse Ensemble, which is an ensemble that each year addresses a different social issue with classical music and tries to bring it actually to a more populous audience. It's not just interested in particular with classical music itself. And just a little background. I got involved in this project through Ido Ocaroni, who is the composer of this piece, who has seen previous work I had done on issues of food security and climate change in the Arctic. I was also participant in the Arctic Circle of Residency, in particular to see the Global Sea Vault there and had done projects in the past with a group called the MAS, which advocates for indigenous women in Mexico to retain rights for basically sea rugs in order to maintain a localized economy and legacy in agriculture. So I work with sculpture and video, but generally around issues of adaptation to extreme climates, changing agriculture, and sort of, I guess just one more note on this piece before I move on to Ivo was that those are cast ice sculptures that were brought into the laboratory at the University of Chicago, where Ivo was already working on basically going into the laboratory where there was equipment that was already filming the high-speed camera fracturing of materials, which was so beautiful when I first saw it, I didn't know how I could possibly like enhance it as an artist. Like maybe the raw material was already gone, but again, I felt like as an artist that what I work with often is symbols instead of language and data and mythology instead of possibly trying to create a documentary narrative. So I ended up casting the ice sculptures and seeing what would happen to them being crushed inside this laboratory filled in slow motion. Sort of as a metaphor for those that are not directly living in a space in central United States and sort of a suburban economy aren't being immediately impacted by climate change versus those that are on the fringes. Right, thank you. So my name is Ivo. So Jens already did all the hard work of introducing the background of this project. So I wanted to add one more small thing to this. So here are some pictures. So this is in the laboratory. So you see there's a big machine there in the background. And so when I talked with Ivo Aronin who initiated this project, so he wanted to do something, climate change, disappearing ice. So I thought, okay, maybe we can just destroy the ice. So I said, in the laboratory, we have to actual the equipment to do this because it may sound kind of easy, a piece of ice, maybe break it. But so I dare every one of you to go home, take a piece of ice cube out of your fridge and try to break it with your hands. It's really, really hard. So this is why we have the equipment to do this. So we have a material tester machine in our lab. So this is just a big machine which you can use to break anything that you want. And so to break one of these ice sculptures that you just saw in this movie, you have to use the force of a medium sized scar on this to actually make a break. So you can try, but it's really hard. To break it is to simply throw a piece of ice on the ground. And so this is what you see here. So this is kind of the setup of the ice or this piece of ice on the ground. And maybe, so I was actually hoping that there was some movies in here because then I became much better at explaining what's going on. But so, let me see. Yeah, so one of the movies that you just showed on Jess was talking, so there was this ice sculpture of this house which was falling down and then it's the ground and it breaks. So the way that we made this ice sculpture, so you just have this mold, you put it in a fridge. And so it takes a very long time actually to freeze such a piece of ice. So, and Jess was with us for a weekend. And so we had to sing in the fridge all day and by the end of the day it finally was frozen enough that we could actually shoot this shot. And as you can see, once you do this shot, the ice is gone. So this is our setup. We have this very small area where we have to drop this house and to give you an idea of this high speed camera's work. So if you blink your eye like this, that's about the amount of time in which everything that you just saw in one of these movies happens. This really happens like this. And so this camera takes several thousand images per second so that's why you can actually see what's going on once something like that breaks. But this is also a pressure on me to actually do this experiment because you have to trigger this camera right at the right moment so that you can actually capture these things which happen instead of blink of an eye. And so I was standing there so I had this piece of ice in my hands. We had this camera set up there and someone else was sitting there with his finger on the trigger. And this was really intense because I had to go to the right place of course because if I talked a little bit to the side you don't see anything at all. And it has to be triggered right at the right moment. But this turned out really well actually. And so after we had a couple more times we just throw things on the ground and get more footage for this. So this is a bit, I guess, my side of this story. How we made this project. And I also thought you had some specialized equipment that could freeze something immediately. Which doesn't exist, by the way. Some hard action to follow. So I made a musical performance work called This Climate World a few years ago and it was inspired by two experiences that fell into my lap one after the other and there were huge blessings and amazing opportunities and the first was a conference I was invited to attend at Columbia's Earth Institute organized by Tipping Point which is a British organization that tries to, their mission is to foster dialogue about the climate crisis by bringing artists and scientists together in these conferences. And there were two speeches in particular that made me want to make something about the climate crisis and the first was a speech by the opening speech of the conference was a guy Wallace Broker who's a climate scientist. He's been around a long time, he's quite an old man and he sighed deeply and said, I wish I could live another 50, he said 50 years to see what's going to happen with this whole situation we're in because we're at a turning point and what we do is going to impact the Earth so profoundly in the next 50 years I'm really curious to see. And so that very personal perspective really hit me and I ended up, we were assigned to make a communication about the issue in a very short, more tiny word limit I can't remember what the number was but it was maybe like 24 words or something. So I wrote lyrics from his perspective with a song that he would sing basically saying I made it 100 years because it worked better with the music. I wish I could live another 100 years and I ended up being the closing song of the piece that I ended up making. And then the next day, a guy named Jeffrey Sacks gave a speech and he writes about sustainability and something in the audience said well what can an artist possibly do that the scientists aren't really doing and he said well you can, his speech was mostly about the miscommunication about climate change in this country and so he said that artists can communicate in a way that's perhaps more visceral and more entertaining and therefore more able to be absorbed than communication coming from journalism or science world. And so those two speeches together maybe want to make something about this issue and then I happen to mention that to somebody at the conference who a couple months later started working for an organization called Cape Farewell which has basically the same mission but at a tipping point they want to foster dialogue about the climate crisis by bringing artists and scientists together but they do it by launching, mostly launching voyages in the Arctic so I did a similar thing to these other guys where I went and lived on a little sailboat in the Arctic for a few weeks and with a bunch of other artists and scientists. So what I ended up making was inspired mostly by that trip, that voyage and so it was kind of like a live documentary musical storytelling of how that trip and me learning about what's happening a very like tiny perspective of my life and then drawing connections to my tiny life and my perspective is that of an alcoholic and recovery and so I sort of drew connections between the society being addicted to fuels that are destroying our habitat but we can't let them go it's also easy to let them go and then I also drew parallels between the boat and the Earth like what Mr. Fuller did, no spaceship Earth because it became very comfortable being on a little tiny boat but there's a limited amount of water and if you make trash it's going to be on a boat with you and that's harder to feel when you're on the Earth and we also found human trash in the middle of this landscape where there's obviously no human civilization so basically my piece just tells the story of that trip and then it's interspersed by commentaries from wildly fictional characters who are from a ghost from 200 years in the past and a Native American woman who was killed during the Westford expansion and then a character from outer space so from very far away who has a wider perspective on Earth because he's from another planet and then a character from the future who's from 200 years in the future who's coming back to let us know that it really turns out okay like our civilization is going to we're going to destroy our civilization but that's actually a good thing I mean that's her perspective that's just her perspective I have a request alright so I'm a scientist and I have the x-ray of our science side of the University of America so how I got here is I had a day job which is the image on the left and so that's the the figure from the first scientific publication that I was ever a part of from the National Academy of Sciences and on the right are details from these pretty large scale abstract expressionist paintings that I used to make so I lived in an artist's studio do that tonight go to the Life of Iowa that morning about 10 years or so ago I started asking these questions so maybe there's something in between if there's an art science what does it look like, how do you do it and most importantly what do you get from doing that that you can't get otherwise and then since that's what I mean you know couldn't be arts actually nurtured by today's discovery so I'm kind of walking this path taking this on and currently at the University of North Texas I found the laboratory and our goal is to develop new ways of seeing new ways of wanting because that's what I believe this blending can give us and that our mission is to come up with breakthroughs in areas that require people to come together across disciplines and then you can't do on your own and the things that we produce range from everything from new types of art or new technologies new knowledge and in particular new kinds of education and new academic industry community partnerships so that's a shot of our lab kind of like the Daily Chaos there's currently 14 students about 50-50 split between the grads and undergrads and listed there are all the different fields we currently have working together in journalism, anthropology, psychology music, community seamless media photography, computer science GIS information systems free sculpture just it's an amazing blend of people coming together working on different projects and together learning from each other so I'm going to show you one short 30 second video another longer video different kind of ends of the second with the kind of things we do I'm just going to do one more time alright so this is a collaboration between colleges and universities I'm currently at University Washington University St. Louis and University of Vermont we've all had faculty and students working on this for about four years are you sick of trying to line up new pictures with old photos tired of fighting with bulky camera equipment repeat photography doesn't have to be this hard refoto, available for Android and iOS devices allows you to quickly and easily line up new photos with old you can either select from ongoing nearby citizen science projects or even create your own refoto is great for environmental monitoring tracking urban development projects or even keeping tabs on your most recent home improvement projects start making your repeat photography projects easy today by going to the iOS or Google Play stores and downloading refoto for free for more information visit projectrefoto.com so it was part of a larger long term research project in ways in which we as everyday citizens can contribute to scientific projects that require imaging images of the environment but also this is being used to provide telemetry changes and everything from ice rinks to historical cultural heritage sites in Pennsylvania and now there's a refoto site right up front door at the end for speeders so you guys can find it, download it find it and then help them see how their trees bloom along the street here and we'll set up a field you can even add places by being out there as an allocation you can just on-flight allocation a point of view, get a receiver you can buy something or just go so now the point about our science immigration here though is refoto photography is an artistic method and it's being used to capture data you actually can't get otherwise because you can get so much energy or lie around the area but that's extensive and it's a certain point of time but here anybody you need any time can be guided to take a photograph so the next project so we talk a lot about the Arctic this is about the Antarctic so I'm going to show you this it's called the Antarctic night and the Arctic night takes four months and we'll hand it over to the rest of us and here the idea is that we're taking these telescopes and we're doing a course of science and allowing us to experience it through something very relevant today which is remix culture we're all used to this constant we copy and paste every day our work processors but we don't realize that when you're working with data it's kind of like a fluid that goes from one state of water can go from liquid to the solid or a gaseous state and so we're actually in process of developing this piece great, great, thanks so we we have about like 13 minutes to have we'll leave like 10 minutes for questions from all of you so I just wanted to throw in a few questions to the panel first one being standard and interdisciplinary work or collaborative work what did you learn from the other the other sides specifically in terms of process if you were an artist was there something in the way that you experienced science working where you then thought aha I want that or I want that to be part of my work somehow I'll just say I've been on a couple of different residency models that you had a blend of artists and scientists working together and I just got really excited about a couple of things working with Evo one was the access to the equipment and the expertise and I also found I guess there were some similarities that I found that I wasn't expecting and one was the general excitement that you and Jim expressed over seeing this footage could have been something that was seen many times over I guess there was a shared interest in the outcome and I think I just wanted to dig up something as well with the conversation I had yesterday where I felt like possibly the artist's methodology is different in terms of finding not necessarily creating a repeatable experiment but creating a critical engagement of the topic that doesn't have necessarily a commodifiable outcome but it's sort of something that's working towards critically engaging an idea and perhaps just challenging accepted theory which I thought may be different from the sciences but you were speaking yesterday actually just the critique and exploration in our experience seemed to be similar and not necessarily just pointing to a solution based but the actual experience of making and working seemed to be shared You know what else? Yes? So these things that we did I wasn't really sure because I'm a scientist so what I'm eventually after is to create some scientific data over this but so it's not that I always whatever I do I have to get data out of something so that was something that what happened in this project so often when I do experiments so I try to explore different directions and so I basically just do experiments and then I look at them for example I did videos of things and I looked at is there anything interesting in them and so this is kind of the way that I approach this problem with this so I say I think it's a problem that's what scientists do so this project so it was not that I thought ok we're going to do this and we're going to get scientific data out of this it's just we're going to make these videos and I think they're going to be super synchronized to the high speed cameras it's kind of good size but there's also so many things to see in there and maybe there's some objects that there is actually something in there that I haven't seen before yet and that might be worth investigating further but I also knew almost everything I do I can struggle right after I do it because it turns out it's completely useless but in this case so in a scientific point of view it could be useless so I'm not going to write a paper about this but you have the advantage that whatever comes out of it it's going to be a very nice piece of art and it's something which would have otherwise been useless now is very useful actually so that was a very nice experience great and maybe just speaking from the art side since we carry out the manifesto in the world of theater for the artists or the artists side of you you combine both our worlds in one human life in this particular interaction between the worlds of art and science what have you found in the world of art offers what can the art side do that the science side can't where does it be so different were you asking her I'm asking her I just have a brief comment on that which is that I feel like I had one interaction you know my piece was inspired by these experiences and interactions with scientists so it wasn't necessarily a direct collaboration but I did have a lot of conversations with people and sometimes I received unsolicited feedback which frequently happens in the arts from all different kinds of people people qualified and totally unqualified anyway so this guy was a I actually did say if you have anything to say but anyway you sent me a long email which surprised me and it was about the final speech of my piece which is kind of I don't know if it was rolling any of the video of me naked in the middle of the snow when my video was playing but there's this video of me because when I was in the arts it really struck me like we could not survive I could not survive here and it's part of the world and the truth is that it's really a a very tiny moment in this planet's history that we're in that we can survive and it's easy to take for granted because we wake up and we can breathe and we can go outside without too much trouble maybe put on a coat and so it's easy to take for granted but when you're in a place like that that's very inhospitable to us it's very probable and so to highlight that I made this video of myself naked like an animal in the wild and the text is saying basically it would be a shame to not address this problem fully and to leave behind and the phrase I used was a leaving on a barren landscape where we once found paradise so that's like a poetic phrase and so I got this feedback from the scientists and said well actually we're probably not going to go extinct from this particular issue like our species will probably survive and you know I'm not actually convinced of that but maybe from a scientific perspective in terms of you know percentages and stuff like that it's not but I think it's important to conceive of that possibility and also just to conceptualize the mortality of our species because our species actually is going to go extinct someday even if it's 5 billion years from now we're not here forever and I feel like that's an extremely important fact to grasp at this point in human history and so for me I feel like that's what the arts can bring is a perspective that's not necessarily it doesn't bear the burden of proof right? like if he's going to write a paper he has to be able to prove it and that's a beautiful thing that's a wonderful thing but it's also I feel like what the arts can offer is to express scientific ideas in a way that is free of that burden I just want to be prominent on that thank you so I thought about these things and it's a slightly different take in that when you engage within this whole notion of what is re-recognizable differences between generally arts and sciences is the notion of validity you need to be reproducible and validate within a community of opportunity and knowledge you're intervening in building upon whereas within the arts the uniqueness of my work as an artist is what gives it its greatest value in the culture but the practice of the arts is what they make in the way that there's three things that I see that artists do when they make work one of them is they record their process within the objects or thought or writing that they make the process, the evolution is recorded within that so the prologens of the work that's very much like the way in which scientists record their protocols or their data is very powerful and that is a huge combination of the sciences and then also the expertise in multimodality in terms of evoking the senses through one word, a sound, a posture or an image and that evocative potential releasing that within the scientific context is also very powerful Great, well I'm going to ask you some of these projects engage with the subject of climate change and the three of you have, well I've visited the sub-artic so a lot of us have gotten into the artic or close to it and in two minutes I'm just wondering if anyone who's had work, especially gone in front of an audience where you've had that interaction between your piece and the public, I'm just wondering if you can speak to what you perceive to be the potential of the arts to effect change and actually engage this crisis, this very complex crisis that we are living in presently and will continue to be living in a very dynamic way and then maybe if you just want to throw out something that might spark some of the questions from our audience and also maybe even if there's something where you realize that this is where the arts doesn't work so well or when you hit a wall with the truth what did that mean? Well I think that change is very difficult for art to incite but I think that one of the things that it does really well is to inspire empathy in people and to personalize this information in an aesthetic way so that we're able to process it and kind of change is something that might happen but I'm not sure that the piece can necessarily incite itself. I think it's much more personal than that but I think that there's something that's kind of interesting about the I think it's about the asking of the questions and the kind of following this thread of what's interesting it's a little bit, I don't know it can be a little bit messy but I think that's what's exciting about it. I'll throw in one follow on that subject but I guess I do believe that art can change society and I think sometimes you can see it more clearly when you think of just in the world of theatre when you think of some of the most significant catalytic plays that have captured the world's imagination and have transformed society you can see it there and some of you don't necessarily see it in your own work because perhaps your own play is certainly hitting quite the same way as Angels of America but I can think something that I've found edifying from being a world of science that science does have this self-awareness that each scientist is part of a larger field and that the individual scientist might be looking at one piece of a very large and complex puzzle and in many cases might be doing something incredibly tedious and boring in order to gather data in order to tell to discover something of this one piece but they know that their work is part of this much larger effort and I think the arts because maybe we emphasize our uniqueness with singularity and vision that we don't necessarily look at our work or look at the work of other artists with quite the same awareness but we are in fact even though we are a peer reviewing us except when it comes to our funding panels working the same way we are a part of a larger whole and I think taken as a whole that we are we are contributing to the direction that our civilization goes in yeah so maybe from there we can just take it out to the audience if you want yeah to ask you particular questions of panels and yeah there's a gentleman back we have microphones and we need to use the lights that we are captured on our live streaming how around TV over here good morning thank you so much for being on the panel we had seconds after receiving a text message from my friend Ash in India I was so happy for him his family as Dr. Batuti and he was sharing the Nobel Prize with Al Homer for the work they were doing in relation to climate change and within a few hours a counter campaign was launched to this credit and show the fallacies of the data that was all funded by the oil industry and so I asked this question there's a way of being able to make an important point that there are industries in this world that are well funded and there are great little harm to be able to counter the work of artists, of scientists in relation to preserving the interest they have whether it be food industry a mining industry or a beauty oil industry and so what can artists do when people in this house because you all have artisans to be able to counter to be able to expose and to stay at least 20 years ahead of what they're doing because there a way ahead of us well I don't think we can ask the question we talked about this a little bit before just one great thing about my experiences it's true I think there's a great appetite for the collaboration of the arts and sciences as someone who got funded by the government to do a layer of climate change we ended up getting a lot of heat from mostly from the right-wing media not directly from the fossil fuels industry but while our show was running at the public there were probably 100 right-wing website and blog and newspaper articles about us our grants been been used used as a as a weapon against the National Science Foundation our our theater companies websites were hacked and taken down costing us like $1,000 but still $1,000 to put them back up again and and my this is someone else who probably can't say the question better but I think I felt very aware of how strong the force can come from the other side and did not really feel anything of unequal support in the world in which I live I guess I was just talking before about power of theater and how you know when you're doing a play it's not necessarily important enough to be taken out by the national media it's not hitting a large enough audience it's not a film it's not a TV it's not significant enough but then at least in my experience like Fox News was felt as significant enough to criticize it in a pretty public way and and we are I guess what I want to say from all that is that I guess one of the messages that I think that for the most part those of us in the humanities those of us who aren't connected to these issues maybe in a direct real way I think are very much just living in a bubble and living in a world that is not that is not real that is not actually what is what is it saying and what's happening in the world if someone else wants to address the question I just I just want to give a shout out I just want to give a shout out I just want to give a shout out just just just to the power of communication and the freedom of speech to you know fight the powers that be I think that's a really true thing it can be daunting it can be daunting what you're saying what you're talking about there's a documentary called Gasland about fracking about the impact of fracking people lighting their tap water on fire and that's you know that can empower people to not sell their land to the oil companies to come and buy it and thrive on it and so I just think I think that's the power I mean yes these organizations they have the money in there and that's power you know as we say probably 20 years ahead but then there's also you know I think the power of the arts and humanities is the power of communication and knowledge and that's the choice to speak about a certain issue in a public forum is the form of power I think you know what I mean like in other words an audience who comes to see that piece whatever it is Gasland or one of these shows might then have in their consciousness a little bit more about this issue and then like you know read the responses to what you're talking about in a different way um yeah I think it all comes down to inspiration so you can have knowledge but if you're not inspired then nothing happens so what I love about theater is that it inspires people anyway I thought to all of you they had to do this stuff that's great I just want to point out which I do think is an important distinction to talk very briefly just about the difference between art and media because I think Gasland is a really effective documentary film and reaches a wide audience but and it's artistic but it has a direct impact and works differently than work that might engage the ways of knowing what might be about metaphor and probably not going to have the same sort of direct real world issue connected outcome there are ways in which art works on as you said the ways of knowing the ways of thinking culture is outside culture is much broader than any singular issue we boil it down to just life or death issues and we're missing the fact that everyone here has voice which is my belief the same and that it is awesome that it was even interested in your play but we did it from the way it came out it's just that there's that broad plurality of points of view that in our country we have that way of generating knowledge and culture that is broad and everyone has a voice oh I think we're out of time let me squeeze in one more oh sorry you're doing it at first I remember so you're lucky man it all fell down to communication and I mean communication from one side to the other and out there and I appreciate everyone your contributions why do you say people are qualified and not qualified to contribute and others said well you don't get positive feedback like you didn't like the non-positive feedback how can non-qualified non-positive feedback people encourage the way communication at you all I didn't want to surround this in this audience remember we'll listen to where we get some of the gates down to not so much try to win the war but just to communicate and do you understand what I'm trying to say well I can't we let's qualify or not qualify why do we have to I'm sorry you don't get it I can't do you want to respond to that since you are talking about those we have to be back we have to be back yeah I was more just going for a laugh I think I have a connection to jumping through this I think I want to recover from that moment but I think that everyone on this panel is generally enthusiastic about all feedback there's moments when you're an artist where you're like just done a show and someone comes up and says something like why did you want it to be so boring really we need to learn how to talk to each other outside of that I think all this work is about starting those conversations and then the contributions of every citizen are very critical I'll just say to counter my previous comment I'll just say that I actually am really happy that we live in an age where there is a stage, a panel, a stadium a podium a forum for all the audience which is a little worldwide but and I've found responses to my work from audience members to be much more interesting and informed and astute than the critics who are qualified to comment on it so yeah I do welcome feedback and that's sort of the whole point of at least what I do is to encourage conversation beyond the scope of the theater I also wanted to say that part of the reason to choose to be an artist is that causing problems is part of your job you know you can critique you can causing controversy does show sometimes that you are 20 years ahead of thinking and working with problematizing issues discussing things that we haven't even talked about in the mainstream media there are too many funding issues and when it does become a real issue often is when it does become a client when a national grant does find something that's not accepted yet or by other general conventions at the time which is interesting when the money can sometimes be the talking point of what is our value and what are our values but I do think it's that's an important part of our job is to create problems to criticize ideas to connect ideas that may not be considered connectable in that way and that's where cross collaboration is important but I do think that creating feedback that we don't normally maybe is a good feedback is also part of our job as well I think Ruth just squeezed in one last thought so you get one last great thought I think this is both a very valuable intersection but it's also very fragile and I think that one of the more important things about it is to just to sustain and keep it alive rather than to polarize it with any particular issue because we think back to human history and the way that we create culture and knowledge there wasn't a divergence between the arts and science there was kind of a holistic activity and how people interested in this intersection they're struggling to build skill sets that are very desirable and it's those people with those skill sets that will come up with solutions that will create things we don't know about so I think part why I'm grateful to be here and have met a group of people and all of you is this is a launching point and you know it's a beginning place for things that happen that was like the perfect thing